Clever Search Engine Marketing Effort by Woot
A few days ago I was looking up the share price of Google and noticed a great ad that Woot had placed, which I captured in a screenshot above. With all of the market turmoil, recession talk, and financial collapse they capitalized with a clever ad reminding people that Woot is available to spend your last remaining dollars. Now I’m not sure what the CPL/CPA is from this strategy, but in my opinion it is one of those intangible brand awareness campaigns that cannot always be accurately measured. Anyone know who handles SEM for Woot or if they are in house?
What If Google Cut You Off?
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking about all of the products and services that I currently use with Google, and what can happen when you are so dependent upon a single vendor when stories like when Google owns you and web searches like Gmail account disabled appear online every few months. I have no idea if Mr. Saber justly or unjustly lost access to his Google based accounts to be fair. I’m just the type of person who utilizes weekly backups to an external hard drive as well as utilizes Mozy for remote online backups. To find out what Google based products I was currently using I headed over to My Account, which listed the following services:
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AdWords |
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Analytics |
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Audio Ads |
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Base |
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Blogger |
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Docs |
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Gmail |
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Groups |
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iGoogle |
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Local Business Center |
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Notebook |
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Reader |
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Sites |
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Talk |
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Trends |
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Web History |
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Webmaster Tools |
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Website Optimizer |
I readily admit that Google has some of the best free services out there, such as Google Website Optimizer, Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics, Google Adwords, etc, etc. I also firmly believe Avinash and others when they list out all of the good things that Google offers. Matt also offers suggestions on how to export your data from Google into other formats. The one thing that this doesn’t take into consideration is if your account is disabled you don’t have the opportunity to go in to export your data. In future posts I’ll outline some steps that you can take to maximize your privacy settings, but my initial recommendation would be to utilize other services in conjunction with Google provided ones as a precaution as well as to verify Google data.
One thing you can do is if you use Google Analytics for your web analytics vendor also tag your pages with another solution. Auriq, Microsoft Analytics, Crazy Egg, Mint, IndexTools, StatCounter, and others all offer the ability to have your pages tagged while being free or low cost solutions. This has the added benefit of verifying Google Analytics if something looks weird or out of place within your data. An extra added benefit to having more than one JavaScript based web analytics solution implemented is you start to collect data as you cannot currently export your data from Google Analytics and upload it to a new vendor.
Other Google based products have alternatives as well. For the SEM based campaigns that I run Google Adwords normally always performs the best, but I always have Yahoo Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Ask Sponsored Listings campaigns ready to go. Most of these solutions offer you the opportunity to simply export your Adwords campaign as a CSV file and then upload them. Ask reps will even upload it for you gladly. There have been a few occassions where my ads were not displaying in Adwords and it took an Adwords rep a few hours to fix the problem. In situations where it could be longer I always want to be safe rather than sorry.
With the exception of a few tools that I use I’ve found that there are alternatives to simply having all of my eggs in a single basket when it comes to the products and services that I utilize online. If you have any other suggestions please free to post them in comments.
